Quotes about illusion

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“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”

“Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.”

“Reason is the illusion of reality”

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.”

“But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.”

“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.”

“The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.”

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”

“It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.”

“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”

“The illusions it had woven for me had taken place only in my head. The battle had been invisible to the naked eye, but the hardest ones are.”

“Who knows what true loneliness is — not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”

“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”

“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”

“We're all travelling heavy with illusions.”

“There is so much more to this world then outward appearances. Our society basks in the illusion of normalcy every day, and hides from the truth every night.”

“Perfection' is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe…. If you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do.”

“The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.”

“How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.”

“When illusions are shattered by truth, talent is set free.”

“As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.”

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your hear that every day is the best day of the year.”

“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."”

“We're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.”

“I had no illusions about love anymore. It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn't. People weren't meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say.”

“On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.”

“No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book, or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.”

“Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?”

“53. 'We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object'-this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there-not just yet. I believed in you.”

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”

“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”

“You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?”

“Hope is not an illusion.”

“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.”

“.. he continues to cling to the forlorn hope that I will turn into one of those swooning females… and fling myself squeeling at him whenever anything happens. Like all men, he clings to his illusions.”

“I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”

“There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence.”

“How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.”

“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”

“The two of you are getting downright chatty, aren't you, Ms. Lane? When did you last see him? what else did he tell you?
I'm asking the questions tonight.
If an illusion of control comforts you, Ms. Lane, by all means, cling to it.”

“But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most… he saw fireflies where there were none.”

“Katie smiled and turned away, knowing it wasn't an illusion or a figment of her imagination. She knew what she saw. She knew what she believed.”

“Routine feeds the illusion of safety…”

“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”

“They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.”

“I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.”

“Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.”

“People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.”

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.”

“The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.”

“We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.”

“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”

“One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.”

“We create the illusions we need to go on.”

“The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.”

“One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.”

“I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

“In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.”

“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”

“The security light made me feel safe, though I knew that was an illusion. If there's light, you can just see what's coming for you a little more clearly.”

“In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.”

“As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Anytime we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel.”

“There was pain, but there was also joy. It was in the tension between the two that life happened. Imperfect as it was, this world was real. Illusion was no substitute. I'd rather live a hard life of fact than a sweet life of lies.”

“There was beauty in the idea of freedom, but it was an illusion. Every human heart was chained by love.”

“Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?”

“Illusion is Reality's coy lover who cheers him when he is grim. Illusion is cunning to his wisdom of ages, weet oblivion to his knowledge. A bounty to his lack. [Sabine]”

“It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.”

“What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.”

“If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.”

“Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”

“The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.”

“The novels that attract me most… are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”

“Power is an illusion of perception.”

“Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference.
George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha: Amen.”

“War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.”

“Rocks are space, and space is illusion.”

“It's life's illusions that I recall, I really don't know life at all”

“True love means you love the real person, not an ideal that you have in your head and superimpose over them. That's illusion and lies to me.”

“This is the unforgiving light of the morning, time to drop the illusion.”

“Illusion is sometimes all that keeps us sane." - Anita”

“Because you can't keep up the illusion forever," I say. "No one has that much magic.”

“One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]”

“Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.”

“You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.”

“Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen. Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light. The only reality is action.”

“Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.”

“I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.”

“Everyone lives bound by their own knowledge and awareness. They define that as reality; but knowledge and awareness are vage, and perhaps better called illusions.”

“… I know all about myself now, I know. You've told me so often. You haven't left me one rag of illusion to clothe myself in.”

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

“If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?”

“All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.”

“Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash.”

“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am -- not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man's devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.”

“Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.”

“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”